Ericsson IPX, the Ericsson business that acts as a payments, messaging and services broker between operators and service providers, has said that it wants to become a Trusted Service Manager (TSM) for mobile NFC payments.
Mattias Johansson, Product Manager, Ericsson IPX, said, “We will launch a TSM brokering service in Europe in 2011. We have some pilots that we are workng with in different markets, and service providers are building proof of concept, but technically we are ready to go.”
A Trusted Service Manager (TSM) in NFC payments is an entity in the ecosystem that sits independent of the mobile operators, and of the banks and financial institutions. Its role is to distribute, provision and activate the applications and services of service providers (such as a credit card application on a device) over mobile networks, but without taking part in the actual transactions themselves.
The idea of the TSM is that it will free up the service providers and the operators from individual contracts, but also conflicts of interest over control over services.
Johansson said that Ericsson IPX, which already acts as a pSMS, MMS and Online Payments provider, is in an ideal position to become a TSM in the NFC payments market – when it goes commercial.
So far, most of the players who are providing, or have said they intend to provide, TSM services have come from the smartcard community, such as Gemalto, or from the payment processing market. Johansson said that he thinks that Ericsson IPX is the first IPX provider to state that it will enter the NFC TSM market.
“We are looking at expanding our family of brokering services, and we see 2011 being the year for NFC launches in Europe,” he said. “There have been a couple of false starts on NFC, but from a standards point of view most of the missing pieces have been defined.”
“The last missing piece is if you are a service provider and you want to launch a service to reach a market, to put an app on the SIM card you need to integrate with all the operators in a single market, and that’s the problem that Ericsson IPX is solving in other industries, currently. So we see ourselves expanding on the IPX role to build on our existing relationships and offer them a single integration and single contract to reach all the operators on the market. It’s a way to make it easier for service providers and for operators to launch NFC services.”
Ericsson IPX currently has connections with 100 mobile operators in 26 countries, and a thousand customers.
The European Payments Council (EPC) and the GSMA recently published a joint paper titled ‘Mobile Contactless Payments Service Management Roles – Requirements and Specifications’. The paper included an outline of the role of the Trusted Service Manager, which is to support banks and mobile operators aiming to promote mobile contactless payments. It also defined a minimum set of requirements for a TSM to interface with banks and mobile operators.